Your Mind Makes It Real

Neo: I thought it wasn't real.
Morpheus: Your mind makes it real.
Neo: If you're killed in the Matrix, you die here?
Morpheus: The body cannot live without the mind.

— The Matrix

You may think that since it's All Just a Dream, you could do lots of cool and risky things without getting hurt, since it's not real anyway.

Nuh-uh, homie.

There's an old wives' tale that claims that if you die in a dream, you die for real. Although a potential mechanism is suggested in "Real Life" below, it remains not exactly clear how anyone could have determined this, since the only witness would be unable to confirm it (unless you believe in spiritualism and he contacted you from the next life). Yet it persists, and a lot of people believe it.

So, if you're in a dream, hallucination, or VR simulation, death can be plenty lethal. By extension, if you're a hacker in a high-tech futuristic world where Cyberspace is navigated through a realistic simulation, intrusion countermeasures can kill you dead. To be fair, certain depictions of Cyberspace require users to link their brains to the network electronically, which would provide a relatively obvious threat to incautious intruders. However, even hackers who operate in worlds without such dangers may be vulnerable to seizure-inducing graphics.

Often, fictional cyberspace ICE (intruder countermeasure electronics) is said to work by channeling lethal voltages into the brain of the invading hacker. Presumably, most users do not know about such things, given their willingness to use an interface that could turn them into a vegetable or corpse at a moment's notice. Authors who put a little more thought into the matter may come up with some variant of the motif of harmful sensation, implying there's some kind of malicious out-of-band signal which triggers a nasty (usually fatal) seizure in its victims or blows up their computer.

Some such systems often propose that the user's mind actually is inside the machine, having been literally downloaded out of his physical brain. Thus, destroying the machine would leave the user's body comatose – but destroying the physical body might leave the mind intact to have a go at possessing someone else.

A common justification of this trope is Synchronization; directly wiring your brain to the machine gives you Technopathic Power at a Price of a potentially-fried brain. Most Cyberpunk games — such as Shadowrun — use this justification, and lampshade it with alternative safer but far-less effective interfaces which someone risking a Brain–Computer Interface can destroy with ease.

This tends to apply to video game levels that are All Just a Dream or a virtual reality simulation as a function of gameplay: If your character dies, it's still a Game Over.

When you are Talking in Your Dreams with someone else and they go to kill you — this may come into play. This may also come into play if, in a dream, a character dies, and that character dies in real life, however, this would be an overlap with Clap Your Hands If You Believe and I'm Not Afraid of You. The Master of Illusion might use this principle to make their illusions harm victims, like making Cold Flames actually burn.

Note that if you're talking about the mind making things literally real in general, that's Clap Your Hands If You Believe, not this. This trope is only about the dying.

Frequently pops up in a Holodeck Malfunction. The defining feature of The Most Dangerous Video Game. When your mind actually changes the physical world, it's Clap Your Hands If You Believe, or the much darker Reality Warping Is Not a Toy. Forget telling yourself not to think about the things you see — for it will become real here. If a computer generated or magical illusion changes the physical world, it's Hard Light. When you're trapped in a virtual world, and have to win or die, it's Win to Exit. The inversion may belong to Dream Emergency Exit, when you have to die to exit. For instances where getting killed in a dream actually can kill you for real, see Never Sleep Again. For instances where it's emotion rather than a belief or perception that harms a character, see Literally Apoplectic.

Compare Puff of Logic, Living Lie, and Magic Feather. Contrast with Visible to Believers. See also Self-Inflicted Hell and Through the Eyes of Madness.

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Advertising

"American Honda Presents DC Comics' Supergirl": Supergirl decides to use a telepathic machine to help a victim of traffic accident wake up from his coma. Though, she is warned that she will die if Steve dies as she is travelling through his mind.

Anime and Manga

3×3 Eyes:
- Illusion magic, obviously enough, works on this principle: as long as the victim doesn't know they've fallen into an illusion, they will experience and suffer the effects. When Sarlama uses such a technique on Yakumo though, the fact that his Healing Factor isn't working allows him to understand he's victim of an illusion.
- Halfway through, Galga is tricked by Connery's illusion spell and is attacked by a nigh-unstoppable Connery who's kicking his ass all over the place: when Hahn sees him later, he can only see Galga moving around in midair and recoiling from the punches of an invisible attacker, much to his confusion.
- Yoriko Kamiyama has demon blood in her veins and she can materialize the thoughts of herself and others, which means that her mind can make thoughts real and solid, in a way similar to Juuma/Fighting Larvae, except that she can conjure anything she (or others) can think of. She's even referred to as the "Mind Larvae User" by the villains.
Hagall from Ah! My Goddess has the power to project an illusion into her opponent's mind which becomes real to them.
Ayakashi Triangle: It is said that if you "truly die" in a dream (i.e. are killed by a Dream Walking ayakashi), your heart/spirit will be destroyed, and you'll never wake up.
The series BALDR Force .exe is based around this concept.
In Bleach, Rojuro "Rose" Otoribashi's Bankai generates music that causes the listener to experience illusions. These illusions feel solid to the listener and can harm them. However, being fully deaf makes one immune to the illusions.
In A Certain Magical Index, Útgarða-Loki is a Master of Illusion, fitting for a mage based on the mythological giant illusionist. He's so good at this that he can make someone feel like he is on fire by showing him a picture of a fire.
Digimon:
- Digimon Adventure: Towards the end of the second Story Arc, Local Boy Genius Izzy figures out the Digital World is a world made out of the data of Earth's network infrastructure and hence all the human protagonists are more than likely made of data in that world. Although he tells everyone to be careful in spite of this new development it doesn't sink in with The Leader Tai and he starts acting like a jackass under the flawed logic that he'll somehow survive regardless of what happens. It takes Izzy telling him that he would more than likely die in both worlds if he messed up to put a stop to his nonsense. Unfortunately, this happens just after a member of the team is kidnapped and they're about to cross an electrified gate to go after her. He loses his bravado right there and the kidnapper gets away more or less scot-free, leading to a short-term Heroic BSoD for Tai.
- Digimon Tamers: While in the Digital World, Henry and Takato manage to cross a massive expanse of water without drowning by convincing themselves that they would only drown if they thought they would.
- Digimon Frontier: Played with when Sixth Ranger Kouichi's consciousness was pulled into the Digital World by the would-be Big Bad Cherubimon. Because of this, he's technically not there, he only believes he's there. It begins to dawn on him that this might be the case when survives several curb stomp battles virtually unscathed while his friends get more and more roughed up. Although at the end, this turns out to be an even more convoluted usage when all of the hinting about the aforementioned results in Kouichi realizing that he is actually dead in real life; he thus makes a Heroic Sacrifice to combine his power with Kouji's to defeat Lucemon, under the justification that out of all of them, he's not really alive in the first place. The Power of Friendship saves him, in the end; this is Digimon, after all.
- In episode 22 of Digimon Ghost Game, Intrepid Merchant Jellymon comes up with a "sleep therapy" business and enlists the aid of Dream Stealer Pillomon. Unfortunately, they get too many customers and Pillomon gets sick from eating all their dreams, accidentally inflicting its Nightmare Bubble attack on everyone which traps them in a Nightmare on Elm Street scenario in which they're chased by SkullGreymon with any injuries they suffer in the dream occurring in real life.
Doraemon: Nobita's the Legend of the Sun King has Doraemon and gang facing a new villain, Ledina's Master of Illusion, who tricks them into thinking they're attacked by gigantic stone monsters with his magic. Doraemon deduces they're fake when Gian tries attacking the monster with a flung spear only for the weapon to phase harmlessly, just as the monster stomps them down. Nobita complains that he still felt the pain even though they're unharmed, because the illusions are messing with their minds.
In Fushigi Yuugi, Tomo of the Seiryuu Seishi is the second-strongest of the group because his illusions are so convincing and complete, they can cause physical damage, even to people who are already aware that his illusions are just that.
Get Backers is fond of this trope, and used it in the IL and Divine Design arcs.
In the .hack series, characters hit by the Data Drain attack within The World are usually sent into a coma in the real world and are temporarily knocked unconscious at the very least.
- Some characters eventually realize that somehow their minds are taken inside the game world, experiencing it with their character's own senses instead of being at home with a headset and gamepad. Naturally, they become deeply concerned about what's going on with their physical bodies, and what happens if their characters are "killed" in this state.
- There's a bit of question in regards to whether the player stuck in the game and the coma victim are related in that manner. Word of God has dropped that the original coma victims were placed in a coma due to noise affecting their mental state, placing their reliance of the physical body explainable only under the conceit that Everything Is Online. In the latter anime and game series, ROOTS and G.U., the danger is a viral Wetware Body existence that uses Harald's original human observation algorithms to affect the mind directly.
In Gundam Build Divers, Tigerwolf tells Riku and Yukki that, since GBN is a virtual world, they run no risk of actually getting hurt and, with practice, can achieve great feats. Since they're newbies to game, though, it doesn't sink in immediately and it takes a few reminders throughout the series to understand that.
Apparently how Hunter × Hunter's Greed Island arc works, up until the eminently satisfying reveal that the virtual reality game can have such far-reaching real-world effects because it is taking place in the real world.
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- In Stardust Crusaders, the Stand "Death 13" pulls its victims into a dream of an amusement park and then kills them while they're trying to figure it out, with anything happening in the dream world being transferred onto the victim in reality. This actually gets used against it - anyone who survives the dream has their memories of it deleted, but Kakyoin thinks to scratch a message to himself into his arm, which allows him to realize what happened.
- In Stone Ocean, this is one interpretation of Heavy Weather. This ability creates subliminal messages which cause people to turn into snails, and those who touch these snails also get turned into a snail. It's possible that the transformation is just part of a mass hallucination, but it could also be that the ability causes a placebo effect so powerful that it can actually physically alter those affected.
Happens in Negima! Magister Negi Magi, during Negi's test to learn Black Magic. He has to fight a phantasmic version of Evangeline formed from his memories inside his head; meanwhile, Chisame has to take care of him, as wounds start appearing on his body as a result of the test, and a lot of Blood from the Mouth.
This trope kicks in proportionally to pilot Synchronization in Neon Genesis Evangelion, as a reflection of pilots' desperation causing them to cry out for their mothers. Contrary to early reassurance from the woefully misinformed Misato that "it's not your real arm, snap out of it", pilots can and do feel their Eva's pain, as Asuka would unfortunately find out after achieving an unprecedented 400% synchronization ratio. She literally cries blood from her eye socket after a Lance of Longinus replica impales her Eva through the face! As she and her Eva desperately reach out to Grasp the Sun in one last futile display of will, she and her Eva's arm is split clean in half by the first in a fatal spear barrage.
This trope is essentially the fuel for the phenomena in Paranoia Agent. It all boils down to belief. When there is enough belief in something (through numbers and/or intensity), it manifests. Such as with Lil' Slugger/Shounen Bat. More and more people believe in the legend that he comes for people on the brink of the Despair Event Horizon, and he thus appears more and more frequently...and all the victims are smiling afterward because they found release. Eventually, the late episodes show the manifestation of imagination beginning to intensify: Ikari's "ideal world" and Maniwa's half-crazed journey to discover Lil' Slugger's origins (the line blurs here because, despite them seemingly being delusions, he learns real facts).
Rick and Morty: The Anime: Played with. In the first episode, Rick designed a virtual reality system for Morty to get immersed with it, but he tells Summer that Morty should know when to back out and not get too obsessed with it or else he'll stay stuck replaying the game, which is what ends up happening as Morty becomes infatuated with Elle and waits several lifetimes trying to meet her amidst many time jumps.
Early in Rurouni Kenshin, during the final battle between Kenshin and Jin-e, the latter reveals that his technique Shin-no-Ippou works based on this principle: he projects a mental suggestion to his victim(s) physical body, which usually causes people to get frozen in place, but can be used in other parts of the body; he nearly asphyxiates Kaoru by paralyzing her diaphragm, and she managed to break out of it from her fear that Kenshin would kill Jin-e and become Battousai again. In short, enough willpower on the target's part renders the technique void.
Subverted in Scrapped Princess, when the titular character enters a VR program to save her brother from being brainwashed, only to be promptly impaled by him when he fails to recognize her. There is a moment of shock, and then she slaps him in the face and continues to shout at him with his sword still stuck through her.
In Sword Art Online, Virtual MMOs have pain inhibitors that prevent this from happening: if a player's pain inhibitor is turned down low or completely disabled, they can suffer actual bodily harm in the real world. The most extreme case is how the creator of the titular game deliberately turned his creation into a deathtrap by designing the virtual reality helmet to destroy the player's brain with microwave radiation if they die in-game or if someone else tries to remove the helmet from them.
The final battle in Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann takes place in something called Super Spiral Space, the space outside the galaxies, where "recognition is given real form". In other words, whatever they imagine exists, exists. Ergo: Your mind makes it real.
In Train to the End of the World, 7G brain wave syndrome is a condition caused by a person believing their body or personality should undergo a certain change. Their belief in this causes the change to actually occur, which can be reversed by performing an action that makes the person believe the change is undone.
Half of the Story Arcs in Yu-Gi-Oh! are about soul-sucking Virtual Reality games. The other half are about soul-sucking millennium items.
- Attempts of the writers to give a scientific explanation for this (Noah's brains were kept alive in a feeding, protective sphere, and directly connected to the VR world he existed in) were mercilessly shot down by the same writers when Noah happily walked off in Mokuba's body, without ever considering taking his brains with him.

Comic Books

In More Fun Comics #27, Doctor Occult uses illusions and hypnotism to turn a snake god's own power against it. Since the god thinks Doctor Occult has become a giant, Doctor Occult actually becomes a giant, and then beats the god so badly its worshippers feel it!
2000 AD:
- Judge Dredd: The powers of the Sisters of Death works this way. As they have no physical presence, they have to get inside people's minds to make them hallucinate truly horrifying stuff. This only works if you think they can hurt you, but it looks real enough that only experienced psychics like Judge Anderson can instantly tell the difference.
- Anderson: Psi-Division: Varies from situation to situation. Sometimes entering another person's mind is quite harmless, but there are many occasions when a Journey to the Center of the Mind can result in death for the psychic who travelled inside.
In Aquaman: Andromeda, the Darkworld's power is based on thoughts, and can manifest anything into reality if the person so much as thinks about it. This nearly gets the crew killed when, for example, they feel it's impossible for the structure to withstand ocean pressure, and it immediately starts to collapse in response.
Trauma was a mutant introduced during Avengers: The Initiative who could become one's greatest fear. It's presumed that Trauma only gains power if his opponent fears what he's turned into since he's been capable of turning into Thor, Hulk, Juggernaut, and several other people/creatures whose power levels are insane. However in a battle against the Hulk during the World War Hulk arc, it was discovered that if his opponents can control themselves during the fight and rein in their fears, he loses power.
In the Doc Samson miniseries, Tina Punnett is trapped in a VR game that's been modified to cause psychosomatic damage to the player. To get out, she runs herself through with a sword, causing lots of pain but also causing the game to end.
In JLA (1997), the final battle begins with Superman seemingly incapacitated by kryptonite as he and other heroes are threatened with execution by the Hyperclan. However, Superman realises that it's only a telepathic illusion and all the Kryptonite poisoning symptoms he's experiencing are all fake when he notices that he's way past the point when he should be dead already, and can hear air raid sirens all over the globe when this much kryptonite should have weakened his powers.
Robin (1993): The only reason Tim, a baseline human, can harm Johnny Warlock, a being that can easily shrug off the injuries caused by a pissed-off Kryptonian, is that Johnny cannot disassociate him with the remembered pain of losing his hand to his own exploding gun after Robin damaged it in a fight while Johnny was still human. His own fear of Rob turns his powers against him when he's fighting him, which Tim absolutely takes advantage of and encourages by acting as though he's impervious to Johnny's powers as otherwise he and his allies would have been killed by the magic user long ago.
In the graphic novel Shifter, the main character finds out that, when using a surrogate (a creature whose nervous system he has complete control over), the creature can be attacked and killed. If he doesn't eject in time, he will be killed, too.
In Star Wars: Legacy, Darth Andeddu conjures illusions of flames and lava and sends them at Darth Wyyrlok. Wyyrlok takes control of them and sends them back. Andeddu is killed, and Wyyrlok muses that Andeddu's own fear made the flames real to him.
In the Elseworlds tale Superman & Batman: Generations, the Guardians eventually reveal that the Green Lantern Ring's weaknesses are all psychosomatic: regular GL's are weak to yellow objects because the Lanterns are told they are, while Alan Scott assumed his ring (which here is a 'standard' Green Lantern ring rather than the Starheart) was weak to wooden objects after a thug clocked him with a baseball bat his first time using it. Hal Jordan, who figured this out on his own, can use the ring without any such hindrances.
X-Men:
- In Uncanny X-Men #133: Cyclops and Mastermind have a sword fight on an "Astral Plane", concluding with Mastermind stabbing Cyclops through the heart. In the real world Cyclops' body slumps over and Nightcrawler loudly announces "Cyclops is Dead!" to end the issue. He got better by the next issue.
- A similar occurrence happened during the "Muir Island Saga"; as they battled on the Astral Plane, the Shadow King crushed Professor Xavier's legs, rendering him crippled in the real world (again).
- Danielle Moonstar, Mirage, has the ability to create illusions based on one's fears. When her powers were temporarily boosted she could make the illusions physical, with the images being more powerful if they scared the person more.
- One issue of Generation X had the old wives' tale quoted at the start before the team had a slasher movie marathon. The rest of the issue consists of Jubilee in a semi-lucid dream trying to wake up before combinations of movie killers and villains she'd faced in her adventures (ex. Sabretooth with Freddy Krueger's outfit) killed her teammates.

Fan Works

In the Jackie Chan Adventures fanfiction Queen of All Oni, after Jade's astral form is subjected to Cold-Blooded Torture by Lung, her body is weakened, she grows claws, and her eyelids become transparent.
In Twist of Fate, Kurosawa the Nightmare Witch can create illusions of people's fears. The more afraid the target is, the more solid the illusion is.
In By the Fire's Light, the Slender Man wouldn't even exist if people didn't believe in it. This is unfortunate for people who ends up on the wrong side of its tendrils whether in waking or dreaming life.
In Child of the Storm, Sean grimly alludes to the possibility of this in chapter 66 and with good reason.
A variation of this occurs in the Farscape fic "In the Flesh" when Pilot and Aeryn swap bodies; where Pilot had trouble adjusting to Chiana and D'Argo's bodies the last time he experienced such a switch, the residual Pilot DNA in Aeryn allows Pilot to get a better understanding of her body.
In the My Little Pony fic Moonlight, while no one has actually died in the dreams, Scootaloo has experienced how injuries taken during her dream journeys will manifest on her real body as well.
In the Harry Potter fanfic This Means War!, Harry is capable of doing impossible magical feats (such as becoming a dual Animagus or casting certain spells without using all the movements and words) because he literally does not know that they are impossible. This backfires when he accidentally turns someone into a living bomb, using just a few lights while subconsciously thinking about doing it.
In the Inside Out fanfic Intercom:
- The protagonist Riley is able to enter her own Mental World while lucid dreaming. Though she's technically dreaming, she is able to access all parts of her mind, rather than just the part where her dreams take place. Because of this, her actions can affect her even after she wakes up.
- Furthermore, in Chapter 13, the possibility of Riley actually dying if she falls into the Memory Dump, a large chasm where forgotten memories go to fade away, is mentioned, though it's never specifically stated that this would actually happen in that situation.
In The Elements of Friendship, Book IS: Bonds, it is eventually revealed that the Alicorn Amulet did not in fact boost Trixie's magic to Physical God levels. It merely amplified her usual illusion tricks to this level, making them impossible to separate from reality.
The Pieces Lie Where They Fell: If you're in Paradise, you can affect your surroundings just by thinking, though the more complex the thing, the harder you have to focus on it.
In the To the New World series, Trina warns Gwyndolin that violence inflicted in dreams can have backlash on their bodies. While he doesn't lose the corresponding limb, the mental shock of his Split Personality's arm being ripped off does almost kill Miquella.
The Untouchable: After one of his Shared Dreams with Voldemort, Harry wakes up with bruises and a bite mark on his neck after Voldemort started aggressively making out with him.

Films — Animation

Kung Fu Panda 1: Po is finally granted access to the Dragon Scroll, but is confused and disappointed when he finds out the scroll is blank. Despondent, he's forced to evacuate the city with the other townspeople from Tai Lung's impending rampage. Po's father, Mr. Ping tries to cheer him up by revealing to him the secret of his Secret Ingredient Soup. It turns out to be...nothing! It's ordinary noodle soup. Mr. Ping explains that he "adds" a secret ingredient because to make something special, one must believe it is special in the first place. It is because of this that Po is able to figure out the true wisdom of the Dragon Scroll.
Paprika has a moment where the dreams and real life can't be told apart because of this trope... Both for the characters and the viewers.
Implied in Pooh's Grand Adventure. Skull Cave at first appears humongous and rather frightening; when Pooh and his friends exit the cave after Christopher Robin arrives, the cave appears smaller and not as scary as it was originally. Christopher Robin said its scary appearance might've been all in their heads, as he puts, can happen if they're alone, afraid, or someone's hurt. When the gang is heading home during "Everything is Right", we get to see what some of the other weird obstacles really looked like – the carnivorous plants were actually harmless roses, and that giant log over a ravine was only a tiny dip.
Toy Story 2: Downplayed: compare the first time Woody's arm is ripped to the second time. The first time it happens, after its decided to put him on the shelf rather than letting Andy take him to camp, Woody loses all use of his arm until it is fixed. The second time, after Stinky Pete intentionally rips it to try and force Woody into going to Japan, Woody can still use his arm, even after it rips more during the escape from the airplane.

Films — Live-Action

In Brainstorm, a character dies while hooked up to a tape that records thoughts and experiences. Someone else "watches" it, and has the exact same heart attack, dying in the process because they didn't disable the pain generators.
David Cronenberg's The Brood starts off with a doctor whose therapy involves making mentally ill patients make their illness a physical one, which he would then cure, hey presto reverse placebo! The titular brood is the result of a woman who, as a child, had been physically and psychologically abused by her alcoholic parents.
Dreamscape, which includes a guy entering the president's dream in order to kill him.
Gamer: This happens at the end. "See this knife? Imagine me driving it into your guts. Think about it, make it real."
In Goosebumps (2015), the explanation for why all the monsters in R.L. Stine's books actually exist is that, when he was younger, Stine was so lonely that he would dream up monsters to terrorize those that bullied him until eventually his belief in them became so strong that they literally leapt off the page.
Both subverted and realized by Inception, where any physical damage in the dream world, even killing yourself, has no physical ramifications in the real world; but mental manipulation within the dream world has mental and thus physical ramifications in the real world.^{For Example}
In The Last Witch Hunter, both the memory potion and the dreamwalkers can make what happens to people in dreams happen to them in reality. This was exploited by the dreamwalkers of the past, as Kaulder calls them the Queen's "deadliest assassins".
The Matrix is the Trope Namer. Characters that suffer physical damage in the Matrix are shown convulsing and coughing up blood, followed by a Flatline as they suffer brain death. Even non-fatal wounds in the Matrix can cause some pain and bleeding in the real world. Judging from Morpheus's words (which incidentally make up the trope name and quote), this is presumably hand waved by the fact that the Matrix simulation overwrites reality for your brain, hence your brain shuts off because it's being force-fed the sensation of death. Whether or not it was purposely designed to do so is never stated, though either way, the Machines sure wouldn't want to change it.
- However, in The Matrix Online, safeguards have apparently been put into place that when a redpill is killed in the Matrix, an emergency switch jacks them out of the Matrix, forcing them to re-enter at a hardline after some recovery time.
- In the original movie, Neo subverts the trope. When Smith finally manages to kill him within the Matrix, Trinity reaches out to him from the real world proving that his mind is still intact and affirms his status as The One; now fully awakened his control is so powerful that he wills himself to life within the Matrix.
- Also averted in the training programs, which are designed to show you that you can die but without actually killing you. For example, the "jump" scenario is considered impossible for a new red-pill to pass, as they cannot perform Roof Hopping yet. Fortunately, the ground below is made to absorb most of the impact, only causing the trainee a fair amount of pain and wounding them slightly in the real world.
A Nightmare on Elm Street. Freddy Krueger has the power to kill people in their dreams. Any damage that he inflicts on you in a dream crosses over into the waking world.
In Stay Alive (2006), a group of beta testers realize that they are slowly dying off one by one in the exact same fashion that their avatars in the game they are testing die. It is later revealed that playing this game summons the ghost of a sociopathic killer who delights in killing you in the most horrendous ways possible.
In Surrogates, originally people could operate remotely-controlled surrogate versions of themselves without any risk – no damage done to the surrogate could have any lasting effect on the operator. Naturally, someone finds a way to subvert this rule, and this is when the problems (and the plot) start. This is different from the original graphic novel, where there is no way to kill a person via his or her surrogate.
The Thirteenth Floor was sneakier: you enter a virtual world by possessing one of its inhabitants and if killed in this state, your mind dies. And not only that, but the victim's mind takes over your body instead because it turns out the process is actually a complete mind swap. No one realized this because the real body usually remained completely unconscious during the process. Virtual death merely broke the connection and jarred the real-world body with the virtual mind inside it awake.
The Videodrome signal can induce the brain to make physical changes in the body.
Virtuosity is not a straight example – the system is designed to train cops in combat situations, similar to the US Army's Real Life Force XXI program. The problem is that different people worked on different parts of the system – and didn't understand how Lindenmeyer's maniacal AI could abuse it. The Dev Team Thought of ALMOST Everything – they programmed in non-lethal simulations of being shot, bludgeoned, and even bitten – but when Sid decided to try electrocuting someone, the poor chump's brain overloaded.
Sid 6.7: Killing for real... It was a real rush.
In What Dreams May Come, this is kind of how the afterlife works, in opposite directions. Everyone has their own personal "heaven" and "hell" based on their thoughts, emotions and ideals held in life. Chris, whose beloved wife Annie is a painter, has a pleasant afterlife based on her bright and scenic paintings. He can even conjure up a cup of coffee from the paint. Annie however commits suicide shortly following the deaths of Chris and both her children in two separate car accidents, and so is condemned into an awful nightmare world based on the decaying ruins of her old family home; it's said by Albert that suicide victims usually end up in hells of their own making because of this.

Manhwa

Lost Saga in Yureka is a game designed so that all the senses are simulated and all sensations can be felt except pain. When a cracker unlocks the pain feature, the sensation of death is enough to kill you. For real.

Radio

Adventures in Odyssey: This seems to apply to all of Whit's virtual reality inventions, the Imagination Station being the most frequently used. At least, if a hacker got a hold of the controls and changed the adventure to put you in the crossfire of cannonballs, the threat was very real, just like threats during the adventure from, say, a ruler who would have you executed for refusing to bow to false gods.
The Big Finish Doctor Who audio adventure "The Mind's Eye" is a textbook example, with the local flora putting Erimem and Peri into a dream-like state (the Doctor isn't ultimately that affected), where they will die for real if they die in their "dream".

Religion

The entire universe is the creation of the human mind according to Buddhism, that's why Buddhas obtain Enlightenment Superpowers, because they can control the Universe at will. A little like Neo in The Matrix (and yes, the movie is heavily based in Buddhist lore).
Certain Indigenous Australian tribes have a death curse for criminals that involves wrapping a piece of the cursed person's hair around a kangaroo bone and performing rituals over it. A special shaman hunter then finds the person and points the bone at them.
- Similar claims have been made of some believers of Vodoun in Haiti and Africa. It is believed by some that Christianity has affected some people strongly enough to cause psychosomatic stigmata to form on their palms, as well (the real wounds of crucifixion would be on the wrists, by the way).
- It's no coincidence that two of the most common "curses" that folklore alleges can be inflicted via supernatural means are "breath stealing" and impotency. Directed against someone with even a minor predisposition to allergies, asthma, or active respiratory infection, the sheer anxiety of believing their breath has been "stolen" could bring on an attack of breathing difficulty. Likewise, performance anxieties exacerbated by an impotency "curse" may impair a male believer's capacity to relax, to such a degree that the parasympathetic reflexes of erection can't take place.
Applied in the theological theory of Pandeism: miracles and revelations occur not because a God is watching over us and intervening, but because the Universe-creating entity has become us (and the rest of the Universe) and believers in any religion are able to unwittingly tap into their own little bit of Creator-power.
Some practitioners of various paths of witchcraft believe in "intent" – if you put a powerful enough intent into a spell, or an object, a sigil, etc., then the event that you wish for will "manifest" (i.e. happen) in real life.

Tabletop Games

Beast: The Primordial: While a Beast's Nightmares are technically only hallucinations and don't physically exist, they are entirely capable of inflicting real injuries, and even death, on their victims.
C°ntinuum: roleplaying in The Yet. When two characters meet while Dreaming, any combat between them is usually harmless – any character who is knocked unconscious or killed just wakes up. However, if one or both of the dreamers uses Telepathy during the combat, the damage inflicted is real and can result in nerve damage (and paralysis when the victim awakens) or death.
The Dark Eye: Dreams and magical illusions are assigned a value of "reality density". At higher levels, they can injure or even kill. Various demons can be tasked to possess and harm somebody in their dreams, especially those from the domain of the archdemoness of undeath and nightmares.
Dungeons & Dragons has several illusion spells (most notably of the Shadow sub-school) that function this way, e.g. Shadow Conjuration and Shades. These spells create illusory constructs or facsimiles of spells from other schools and have reduced effects on characters that successfully "disbelieve" them. Naturally, they always have this reduced effect on objects and creatures with low intelligence, such as constructs.
- Some Phantasm spells, such as Phantasmal Killer and Weird, make you save or die upon failing the roll to disbelieve, doing nasty damage even on success. Annoyingly, Death Ward, which protects against other spells that make you save or die, won't protect you against this because it's an illusion based on fear since Death Ward protects only against direct, external magical energies that cause death, while these illusions essentially rely on tricking the target into killing itself. 5th edition alters both so that, while they're not instant death, their torment lasts longer, Frightening the target(s) and damaging at the end of each round until it's over or they finally make their save to disbelieve it.
- 5e also throws in more personalized illusions (focusing on fooling one target extremely thoroughly rather than many at once), like Phantasmal Force and Mind Prison, that deal Psychic damage to the target if it crosses the "boundaries" of its illusion into something that would do it harm if it were real, and which the target perceives as appropriate. As an example, if you made Mind Prison manifest as a giant ring of flames, if the target tried to walk through it (after failing the Intelligence save) it would take huge amounts of Psychic damage that it would think was severe burns.
- One of the first Dragonlance game modules had the player characters travel into a living nightmare to end its hold over an elven kingdom. Many of the monsters the players encounter are in fact creations of the dream and can be made harmless if players state they don't believe in them. Unfortunately, quite a few of those monsters are very real and will attack the players anyway, and it's very difficult to tell the difference.
- Some D&D-based literature describes the physical threat of illusions. Trollshead (in The Dragon, #31), describes how some people ran through the illusion while others were burned alive and left charred.
- A level-up feat for Wizards specializing in Illusion allows them to do this in non-lethal ways as well. Basically, they could (for instance) create the temporary illusion of a bridge that appears so real, people can walk on it.
- The psionic powers "Recall Agony" and "Recall Death" cause the target to see into the future – specifically, to witness a possible future in which the target dies horribly. This can cause the target to die horribly.
Final Girl (2021): This is part of the mechanics when dealing with Dr. Fright, to no surprise given he's an Expy of Freddy Krueger. When he's the Killer, the Final Girl gains a card that signifies whether she's Asleep or Awake. When Awake, the Final Girl cannot be attacked by Dr. Fright, but cannot attack him, either. The Final Girl must fall Asleep to attack Dr. Fright, but this also renders her vulnerable to his attacks. One of Dr. Fright's Dark Powers allows him to attack while the Final Girl is Awake, while one of his Finales renders her permanently Asleep.
GURPS: The "stigmata" enhancement to the Illusion advantage from GURPS: Powers can cause small amounts of damage to the target, but only to the point that he falls unconscious from the wounds.
Mage: The Awakening: This can happen to you in with the Astral Realms. Under normal circumstances, attacks in the Astral Realms don't harm health, but instead reduce Willpower (a person's reserve of mental and emotional strength). If a person loses all of their Willpower (not necessarily from being attacked) they return to the waking world, unable to maintain their Astral self and completely emotionally drained, but otherwise unharmed. There are however ways in which the person can be damaged or destroyed mentally. For example, being attacked by an ideology until the person's identity is completely buried beneath fanaticism, being drawn into the hold of an insanity realm until one's personality is utterly destroyed from that insanity, or going to the Dreamtime unprotected, where one's mind will be completely washed away by a consciousness which is incompressible to and uninterested in human perspective or individuality (essentially, your sense of identity is lost among the thoughts of something which has existed before there was life). In these cases, the body becomes a completely healthy vegetable. There are also beings capable of inflicting actual damage from the Astral Realms, though this is more to do with magically being able to target your body directly rather than because Their Mind Makes It Real.
Pathfinder: If a creature's dreaming self dies within a dream under the control of a nightmare dragon, then its material body also dies.
Shadowrun uses the "lethal biofeedback" version in its cyberspace. Cyberspace in the Shadowrun universe is based on an ASIST (Artificial Sensory Induction System Technology) interface, which is the same tech that powers Simsense. Black IC kills by inserting dangerous biofeedback responses into the decker's cyberdeck, essentially raising the deck's simsense signal to that of a BTL chip on overdose intensity. A hacker can avoid the feedback by using what's referred to as a Cold ASIST interface (as opposed to the Hot ASIST interface that most deckers use). However, not only does Cold ASIST forgo all the massive bonuses to your die rolls that Hot ASIST grants, (which is why hackers use Hot ASIST, despite Cold ASIST being the default user mode for all legitimate users of neural interface technology), but all the other deckers will mock you viciously before they Curb Stomp your Nerfed tuchas. One of the major events of the metaplot had the Matrix crashing, which resulted in people either dying or suffering irreparable brain damage when their cyberpersonas were cut off from their bodies. Considering the fact that deckers directly connect their brains to the Matrix, this is at least somewhat more acceptable than other reasons.
Warhammer 40,000: The Warp is made up of the thoughts, emotions, beliefs, and feelings of everything. It's said that every strong emotion forms a daemon in the Warp, and daemons who are strong enough can join The Legions of Hell to attack realspace. Enough belief can actually bleed over into reality and start changing things – the Orks use this to amazing effect. Lastly, psykers can astral project themselves either deep into the Warp to predict the future or into the shallows to spy on reality; getting attacked by daemons in this state will most certainly kill you in the most painful ways the mortal soul can imagine (as well as several ways that it can't).

Visual Novels

In the world of A Nightmare's Trip, Conductors can turn the products of their dreams into real, humanoid people. Adrien himself is a nightmare created that way, though he doesn't remember who his Conductor is.
Danganronpa:
- Discussed in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair after it's revealed that everyone has been inside a virtual reality the entire time. The people who died aren't actually dead, but having their avatars deleted caused their real brains to shut down, rendering them comatose. Junko and others like Kyoko think it would be a "miracle" if the students "killed" in the Neo World Program would wake up again, but there was a small hope. Come Side: Hope of Danganronpa 3 and it's revealed that Hajime (after merging with Izuru) was able to bring everybody back.
  Sonia: In a distant country, there was a certain experiment carried out on one of their prisoners. The prisoner was blindfolded, strapped to a bed, and had small wounds applied to his toes to drain his blood. That prisoner was left alone in the experiment room, as the sound of dripping blood echoed throughout the room. But in fact, his blood was not being drained. He was just forced to listen to the sound of dripping water, but he believed he was bleeding to death. However, in spite of that, the prisoner still died.
- Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Comes into play again during Chapter 4 when the group enters a VR simulation, and Miu's avatar is strangled to death. When the others wake up, she's clutching at her throat, and been rendered dead for real.

Web Animation

If the Emperor Had a Text-to-Speech Device: The Emperor uses his psychic powers to "delete" Custodisi after one too many lewd remarks towards Magnus, causing him to disappear. He next appears as a Non-Player Character in a Tabletop RPG the characters play. (Maybe he was banished from existence and thus appeared in a nonexistent place?) When he finds his way back later on, he has a prosthetic arm in the place of the one he lost while fighting the Player Characters.
Sarge from Red vs. Blue explains this to Grif and Simmons when showing them the holographic simulation room.

Webcomics

Alice and the Nightmare is one big deconstruction of the Dream Stealer trope, specifically because of this trope. Residents of the Dream World, basically Wonderland and the Looking Glass territory, steal dreams from sleeping humans for use in their modern-day technologies and to stabilize their world while fighting off eldritch nightmares that can manifest in dreams and Wonderland. This is exactly as dangerous as it sounds; the humans on both sides can utterly screw each other over in a dream. Not only do dream harvesters have a disturbingly high death rate, but screwing around with a dream too long may cause the sleeping human to develop a psychic affinity, accidentally teleport themselves into Wonderland, and literally mutate into their worst nightmare that will hunt down Wonderlandians until it is put down by the firing squad.
That's how dream world can be dangerous in Archipelago - if you get injured in there, and a specialised healer doesn't treat you on time, the scars, blinded eyes, and lost limbs become real.
Discussed and averted in El Goonish Shive, nothing Sarah does while using her simulated time stop spell affects the real world according to Tedd.
The aforementioned D&D uses of this trope led Full Frontal Nerdity to have "Quantum Roll to Disbelieve", where a successful roll would cause something to cease to exist.
Frank: That's one way to avoid encumbrance limitations. What did [Wizards of the Coast] say?
Shawn: "Natural 20! We disbelieve that we ever saw this!"
Housepets! has an appropriately titled strip named strip called Your Mind Makes It Real.
Irregular Webcomic! does it too. It's the cause of death for one of the characters in the sci-fi theme.
In a Metroid-based webcomic called Metroid: Third Derivative, Samus is "uploaded" to the Space Pirates' main computer, and put into a training simulation by a mostly-friendly pirate. Samus asks the Pirate, "And I suppose if I die here I die in the real world too?" The Pirate answers, "What? No. That's stupid and completely defeats the point of virtual training." To which she replies, "Chalk up a rare victory for common sense then."
Subverted in 9th Elsewhere: The character who is actually asleep, Carmen, is perfectly safe inside her own mind. The muses who journey with her, on the other hand, can fully manifest themselves in her mind, and therefore can have harm done to them, and they need to eat, breathe, and sleep, unlike Carmen.
As the lore of Nixvir, the snowmen can do this in regards to whether they can actually feel physical pain despite not being capable of feeling it. If they think the pain they're experiencing is real, it's real.
Paranatural: Spirits who have bonded with humans can pull them into a "spirit world," a sort of shared hallucination where the pair can communicate with a heightened perception of time so that it seems like Time Stands Still. While this is all in the human's mind, if the spirit were to, say, bite the human's head off, the human's head would be bitten off in real life.
Max: WHAAAT!? H-how is THAT—
Mr. Spender: It's a supernatural thing. I wouldn't worry about it. About how it works, I mean. You should definitely worry about having your head bitten off.
Schlock Mercenary: Schlock is infected with Nano Machines who pull him into a virtual interface to try and communicate, he responds by pulling an imaginary Plasma Cannon on them.
Blood Nannies: Look, we told you already... that thing won't work in here. It's just a metaphor.
Schlock: But a meta for what? I've got a pretty good immune system.
xkcd: Parodied: "If you die in Canada, you die in real life!"
YU+ME: dream :
- People from the real world who enter the Dream World can make anything they dream about real as Reality Warpers. Fiona is especially skilled at it. So is Sadako, and when she opened the dream world to reality, told everyone who entered they could do anything there. The lack of control that let people do anything is why she started DreamCo, sealing people's dreams away individually in boxes and hiring actors to perform in them to keep them company while they slept.
- Bricking up or otherwise sealing yourself off completely from the real world means you die in your sleep, a form of suicide. This is how Lia died, when she thought she was in heaven with her love George.

Web Originals

SCP Foundation:
- Anyone who plays SCP-896 ("Online Role Playing Game") will have their real-life attributes increase to same degree that their in-game attributes do. However, if one of a character's attributes rises too high above the others, the player's attributes decrease. The Foundation developed a harmless version of the game because it was publicized too heavily to just destroy, but in usual Fridge Horror fashion Foundation employees have very recently been barred from playing the harmless version too.
- One of the phenomena observed by the Foundation is SCP-1237, a peculiar type of brain-wave pattern found in some humans. People capable of so-called "epsilon-wave sleep" will find that things they have dreamed about come true.
- Inverted with SCP-2470 ("The Void Singularity"), an abstract extradimensional entity that contains the ability to erase whatever it perceives or understands.
The Slender Man Mythos: The Slender Man is theorized to have been created by this, coupled with lots of stories so the universe can fit him into history.
The monsters from What Time Is It, Mr. Wolf? exist because of this. In the case of the boogeyman, acknowledging this trope is a way to kill him.
"There's a bleeding, gaping hole split through the socket of your shoulder, where your arm once dangled.
The boogeyman exists. The boogeyman exists. The boogeyman exists."

Western Animation

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters confirms this to be the very reason monsters exist at all. In the episode "Where Have All the Monsters Gone?" The Pool of Elders starts to dry up and monsters disappear PIECE BY PIECE. The Pool confirms to Ickis that monsters were first born out of the fears of the human mind. This very same fear fuels the Pool, if the Pool ever dries up? Monsters will vanish from existence altogether.
Adventure Time: In "Rainy Day Daydream", Finn and Jake are stuck inside due to a "knife storm", and Jake suggests using their imaginations to pass the time. However, everything Jake thinks up (like a pool of lava, venomous snakes, and a "bazooka goblin") turns real, even though only Jake can see it. He and Finn have a crazy adventure in their own tree house trying to reset Jake's imagination and get rid of the threats.
Batman: The Animated Series: In "What is Reality?", the Riddler hooks Commissioner Gordon up to a virtual reality computer program that can do such a realistic simulation of high-G loads that Gordon's physical body would think it really was happening and suffer cardiac arrest. In the same episode, Riddler himself gets his brain fried when the computer crashes while he's still hooked to it.
Code Lyoko is an exception, sometimes; when Ulrich, Yumi, or Odd lose all their Life Points, they are merely rematerialized into the real world. If this happens, they simply return to the material world too weak to stand up. Also, there's a twelve-hour cooldown between respawns. However, this return only works when the scanners that allow access to Lyoko are functional. Also, Aelita, who was tied to the computer for the first two seasons, would have been lost forever if she ran out of Life Points. Unsurprisingly, she was never actually devirtualized until the tie was broken, but plenty of times after that. Also, it appears that no matter who you are, falling into any of the Bottomless Pits surrounding the areas appears to prevent you from ever coming back. On several occasions, someone attacks their own ally to prevent this from happening.
- This abyss is referred to as "The Digital Sea"—essentially a representation of the raw networks that are outside the control of the Supercomputer which runs Lyoko. Any persona that fell in would be scrambled beyond the ability to reconstruct it, thus the danger.
The Fairly OddParents!, "Power Mad", also hinges on a similar plotline, though this is because the main character has wished himself fully into the game.
Family Guy:
- Mentioned offhand in the episode "Blind Ambition":
  Tom Tucker: In sadder news, the man who held the Guinness World Record for "Most Drugs Ever Done by a Single Human Being" died today. He was attacked by a pack of wild dogs... he thought he saw.
- In "The Splendid Source", Peter craps his pants every time he hears a dirty joke, which causes Quagmire and Joe to find different ways to get him to do so. One method involves Quagmire paying Freddy Krueger to repeat the joke, which causes Peter to wake up and comment, "When you poop in your dreams, you poop for real!"
Futurama:
- Parodied and possibly subverted in "Parasites Lost". When most of the Planet Express crew take a "Fantastic Voyage" Plot through Fry's body, it isn't the actual characters who go on the trip. They are actually nanobots remotely controlled by the crew interacting with a VR simulation of Fry's innards. Toward the end of the episode, Leela chops the other characters to bits with an axe while they're all still in tiny robot mode. Immediately afterwards, we see the actual characters taking off their virtual reality equipment back at the office. When someone asks if everyone is okay, they cheerfully agree that they are.
- Foreshadowed in a previous episode; the internet is fully VR, and dying in the 'video game' section just causes extreme annoyance.
Kaeloo: In the episode "Let's Play Danger Island Survivor", Kaeloo sets up a game show for her friends which is full of completely normal things which she asks the, to pretend are dangerous obstacles. It actually works (for example when Stumpy steps on "lava", his feet actually catch fire). Mr. Cat takes advantage of this by pushing Quack Quack into a "precipice" and saying things to fuel his imagination ("It's full of hungry alligators!"), resulting in Quack Quack being eaten by alligators.
The Kim Possible episode "Virtu-Ron" features a VR system which malfunctions, resulting in extreme aggression if the players are removed without winning the game.
The Loud House: In the Musical Episode "Really Loud Music", Luna begins to worry if the song she wrote won't be a song the whole world will love; it's at that point she starts hearing her family burst into songs out of nowhere (Lola singing a show tune, Lana performing a toilet jam, Lisa doing a rap, Lori and Leni singing a love ballad, and so forth). When the first three claim they weren't singing at all, Lisa concludes that Luna is hallucinating her family singing because her brain is trying to find the right genre for her song thus brings said genres to life in the form of each family member.
In one episode of Ruby Gloom, the gang brings a sick bunny into their home and Misery catches a cold from him. She's a sneezing, stuffy-nosed mess for the entire episode, until the end when the bunny is outed as a thief who was faking being sick to rob them. Once Misery learns he was faking, her cold instantly disappears.
The Simpsons:
- Double Subverted in the episode "How I Wet Your Mother", which parodies Inception with Professor Frink's device that allows Homer's family into his dreams. When the family is falling down a cliff, Marge assures them that if they die in the dream they'll just wake up, but then Frink interjects, saying that since he didn't update Adobe Acrobat they'll actually die for real.
- In the "Nightmare on Evergreen Terrace" segment of "Treehouse of Horror VI", an undead Groundskeeper Willie haunts Springfield Elementary students' dreams and kills them at weak moments.
Superfriends: In "The Fear", the Scarecrow makes Wonder Woman hallucinate that The Walls Are Closing In. She tries to hold back the imaginary walls but can't. Scarecrow comments that her body will feel like it is actually being crushed and suffocated. Wonder Woman gasps for air and passes out.
Used in the climax of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) arc in which the four are trapped in a memory virtual reality program. Complete with a Shout-Out delivered by Michelangelo to The Matrix.
In the Teen Titans (2003) episode "Haunted", Robin is exposed to a hallucinogen that causes him to see and fight Slade, and received real injuries as a result. Whether or not those injuries were an example of this, or merely him beating himself up while hallucinating, is not entirely explained.
Raven: I don't know if he's real or not. But he's real to Robin, and that's all that matters.
Transformers: Animated, "Human Error Part 2": The Autobots realizing that they're in a computer simulation set up by Soundwave, manage to change their human bodies back to their Cybertronian ones by thinking about it. Amusingly, Bulkhead can't until he makes the transforming noise with his mouth.
In Young Justice (2010), this is what happens in the episode "Failsafe" when it was supposed to be a mental simulation that had Gone Horribly Wrong. It went From Bad to Worse when M'Gann was so overcome by Artemis' "death" that she unintentionally rewrote everyone's memories so that the team forgot it was a training exercise and slipped into a real coma when they "died".

Real Life

Hypnotic suggestions work this way. It is possible for somebody in a deep hypnotic trance to feel things that are not present, which leads to some real-life Power Perversion Potential.
Conversely, the opposite effect can occur when someone suffers from extreme depression or complete loss of hope. Someone with failing health could increase their lifespan and quality of life if they believed something that gave them hope (not just "a positive attitude"), but those without hope will often succumb to their ailments, especially if they have been dealing with them for a long time. Teddy Roosevelt was considered to be the pinnacle of stubborn toughness, but when his son died, he fell into despair and died shortly after.
- A study of cancer patients showed that in many cases where the prognosis was presented in a negative way, some patients simply gave up and lost hope. These patients tended to succumb much more quickly, in some cases well before the disease had progressed enough to be able to kill a person on its own.
It doesn't actually make it real, but this is the belief for many sufferers of OCD, who have intrusive thoughts that if they don't perform actions and rituals terrible things are going to happen. They don't nor ever will happen, but the sufferer can believe that their brain's belief will make it real, so they do it just to be safe.
In general, it's been proven that we're pretty easy to fool in this regard. A newer type of prosthetic limb channels physical feedback from the prosthetic to the stump. It doesn't take long for your mind to associate that stimulation with your prosthetic to the point that it feels like your actual limb. Also, VR can make you think a virtual image or a displaced image of something else is your real body, as demonstrated by such hilarious pratfalls as this man taking a leap of faith VR game so seriously that he launches himself straight into the television! Our brains are built ready for cybernetic upgrades.
- Speaking of VR, there is a phenomenon called "phantom touch" in which some individuals will "feel" themselves being touched in VR. Thought to be related to phantom limb syndrome, sensations vary from light tingles in the touched area of one's avatar (even long ears and tails can be felt in some avatars) to full-on "phantom sense" in which some may even imagine temperature changes or smells from certain objects or environments to the extent that it's almost real to them.
- And for the matter, unrelated studies and effects can offer interesting insight into how much our brain fools us. During one brain surgery, one patient felt the presence of a non-existent person 'nearby'. Follow-up tests/cases show that a part of the brain responsible for the sense of personal location within 3d space was being triggered and manipulated resulting in people sensing and seeing what amounts to classical depictions of doppelgangers.
- In another case, scientists found that low frequency sounds triggered feelings of dread, fear, and the sensation of other somethings in the room (ie typical 'signs' of ghosts). In this case, one likely justification for why this might be is because this frequency range also happens to be the same range at which many large predators growl at. Another possibility is the low frequencies represent hints of rumbling: in other words, something very big (and probably very dangerous) approaching – like a stampede, an avalanche, etc. Cracked.com has a number of articles on this and similar ways our brains play with us.
  Cracked: Nature's way of saying "Shit your pants!"
Hysterical Pregnancies tend to make humans/animals experience all of the symptoms of being pregnant including an expanded stomach area as well as a baby kicking (called "quickening"). These women believe they are pregnant.
- In the same vein is Couvade Syndrome or a Sympathetic Pregnancy where the husband will experience labor pains, cramps, morning sickness, and other symptoms of pregnancy, although a man doesn't normally believe he is pregnant.
Somatoform Disorders can cause this to happen. One of the earliest diagnosed Somatoform Disorders is "Conversion Disorder", which causes a person's psychological stresses to be converted into physical pain.
- Though some have made the case that the evidence for conversion needs to be re-examined. It was originally based on preconceived notions about women and about VD.^note With no penicillin yet, doctors routinely prescribed mercury not just as a cure but a preventative. Mercury causes serious neurological damage including off-and-on paralysis, heart palpitations, deafness, blindness and pain. After Freud, doctors could now write those off as "hysteria". Hysteria became a garbage-can diagnosis; even a plain old orgasm was called a "hysterical paroxysm".
A Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by studies of this and similar cases. A number of healthy middle-aged immigrants died in their sleep from heart attacks. After checking and rejecting every cause they could think of, the investigators concluded that the deceased were scared to death by nightmares.
The whole urban legend about the Canadian $100 bill smelling like maple syrup has prompted many people to actually smell maple syrup on the note, and sometimes on all new bills.
Essentially the idea behind "psychosomatic symptoms". Again, a number of illnesses have been written off as this, then found to be real as medical Science Marches On.
Guilt complexes can work like this. A person can experience feelings of guilt and remorse despite not having actually done anything (free-floating guilt). Rather than actual actions, these feelings could come from the thought of doing something wrong, like briefly fantasizing about someone else when you're already in a relationship. It could also come from shame over living a better life than someone less fortunate (or just living at all) and feeling like you haven't done enough to help others. Once your mind makes it real, the guilt is able to feed off itself and create a cycle of negative, irrational thinking.
The Morgellons phenomenon has been listed by some experts as a disease that is spread through the Internet. Essentially it's a form of delusional parasitosis^note in which alleged sufferers claim to be infested with strange, organic fibers. Upon medical examination, it's almost always revealed these fibers are synthetic and the sores they complain about are the result of compulsive scratching; the catch is the "disease" continues to get worse once a person has self-diagnosed themselves with "Morgellons", creating a cycle of a continually worsening condition caused by delusions which are caused by the continuing worsening condition. The only way to prevent it is by avoiding social "contamination" of Morgellons, which is to say be unaware of the concept in the first place.
Hypochondria is another example. It's a condition where a person becomes paranoid that they're suffering from a chronic or deadly illness, despite nothing being wrong with them. They get many different types of medical tests done and told nothing is wrong, but they refuse to accept the positive results. This results in heavy anxiety, panic attacks, and overall bad stress which have symptoms common with some major illnesses which further convince them something is wrong. And since too much stress is unhealthy, the person eventually causes a real illness to happen.
A very simple vaudeville attraction works this way: You are in a "rotor", and then you get rotated head-over-heels. No, you aren't, it's your surrounding that is rotated, you are completely motionless. But if you fell for it, by now you are probably desperately clenching into your seat for not falling out, creating exactly the force that you'll expect (actio=reactio).
Inverted with some mental illnesses and developmental disorders (i.e. depression for the former, autism for the latter). Some people with actual depression and actually autistic people might be afraid of "making it up" or "faking it for attention". While there are people who fake a disorder/an illness for attention ^note, if someone is in doubt about their issues, it's usually best to seek professional advice.
Art is basically made by arranging lines, colors, and shapes in such a way that the brain falsely perceives it as looking like the intended object(s) instead of the assorted lines and marks that it actually is. Most art in general works like a complex optical illusion.
- The exception is some abstract art that is not intended to be perceived as any object in particular.
Tulpas are a recently rediscovered phenomenon. They're essentially alters (similar to those borne from dissociative identity disorder), sometimes accompanied by sensory hallucinations (one tulpamancer reported that when she was cold, her tulpa removed its jacket and gave it to her, producing a sensation of warmth) as if the tulpa was actually interacting with you. They're created by first creating their appearance and personality, then imagining that you're having conversations with them or taking them to places, and eventually the mind gets used to it and the tulpa gains their own consciousness. The longer it's done for, the more independent the tulpa becomes.
A Vasovagal Syncope is something that causes you to faint when your body overreacts to certain triggers, such as extreme emotional distress or the sight of something that you have a phobia of. This means that, ironically, you can faint because you fear you're going to faint.

Your Mind Makes It Real
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She Broke My Neck

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Your Mind Makes It Real 23 Following

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Your Mind Makes It Real
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